25 October 2012

The Bible Gateway is a simple but impressive collection of online Bibles in many languages. If you want to read and search the Bible on your laptop, tablet or phone, it may be all you need. It's free, fast, and effective and comes with helpful extras like reading plans and devotionals.

Today we're going to take a look at The Bible Gateway. The main purpose of this free website is to provide online Bibles - and there are a lot of them. At the time of writing, there are thirty-four English translations as well as many more in a wide range of other languages. Take a look at the full list.

A clickable list of Bible books is available for each version, as an example, here's the list for the Knox Bible. But the normal way into the Bible Gateway is through its search facility.

Searching - The homepage has a search box under the site banner. The search box is accompanied by a drop down list of versions. Simply type a search term, choose a version, and press 'Enter' or click the search button. You can skip the version choice if the default is OK (and you can change the preferred default version in the system's settings).

What can you put in the search box? You can type a topical query such as 'love' or 'one another' (put exact phrases in double quotes) and then press 'Enter' or pick from a list of suggestions.

Or you can enter a chapter such as '1 Cor 13' or '1 Corinthians 13' to read it in its entirety. The display provides links to move backwards and forwards a chapter at a time.

Other features - The Bible Gateway doesn't offer Bible study tools. It is intended primarily as a resource for Bible reading and text retrieval.

To this end it offers audio versions, commentaries, reading plans, dictionaries and versions of the site for use on mobile phones.

There is also a Bible Gateway app and various other tools, check the list in the left-hand panel.

Conclusion - If you want to read the Bible online, check out unusual versions, or search for a particular passage, Bible Gateway might be all you need. It's simple to use, quick to load, flexible, and only a web browser away. There nothing to install and nothing to pay, just load the website and begin reading and searching.